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Polymers & soft condensed matter

Soft Matter is a sub-discipline of condensed matter and focusses upon chemical & biological matter that is easily deformed by thermal forces or fluctuations. These materials show their most interesting behaviour/properties at energy scales on the order of kT where classical (as opposed to quantum) physics dominate. This group is interested in the physical chemistry of soft matter, as for example, the behavior of single molecule machines, such as rotaxanes, or the mobility of colloids near a liquid interface or membrane surface, or the properties of polymer brushes. Our experimental tools are pico-Newton-scale force measurement devices, such as Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Optical Tweezers (OT), while our predictive efforts use theory and computational methods in statistical thermodynamics.